Another week, another major British ballet company takes on a key cultural patrimony in a brand-new work. It might seem odd that the Royal Ballet’s new Winter’s Tale generates more critical reservations than English National Ballet’s take on the First World War, though the two evenings succeed and fail in almost equal measure.

Belgian Alain Platel makes the kind of dance theatre (like Pina Bausch, to whom he has an oft-remarked debt) for which both “dance” and “theatre” are very loose and inadequate umbrella terms. “Sets” are often jaw-dropping colonisations of stage space; there are no flats or drops painted to resemble other things, but huge quantities of actual stuff with which the dancers interact. These “dancers” are actors too, but their “dialogue” is not continuous speech but snatches and fragments, absurd and incongruous phrases which sit in the air like the absurd and incongruous objects on the stage.

Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through.

When three good choreographers can’t get a ballet right, there must be something wrong with either the story or the music. In the case of the Prince of the Pagodas (a Poirot mystery waiting to be written, that, but I digress), it’s hardly the music: Benjamin Britten’s gamelan-leavened, melodic score, his only for a ballet, is compelling. Of course, it hardly serves up Classic FM-worthy five-minute flower waltzes à la Tchaikovsky, Adam, Minkus et al, but then neither does Prokofiev’s Cinderella and that has no problem getting produced.

Israeli-born choreographer Hofesh Shechter has had a meteoric rise. Ten years ago, he was a dancer in somebody else’s company who had just taken a couple of steps into choreography. Now he has his own full-time company, can pack out Sadler’s Wells twice a year, and gets invited to stage his creations for top international companies like Nederlands Dans Theater.

Luca Silvestrini paints his contentious look at multiculturalism in Britain in the brash primary colours of stereotyping, allowing little space on the canvas for the light and shade of personal insight. He woefully underuses the experiences of his international company (experience which fed fascinatingly into the post-show discussion on Wednesday night) and for the most part pitches the work on one tediously derisive level.

In Trasmín, the curtain rises on two bodies leaning apart, yet reaching back to face one other, each columnar figure a twisted into a perfect spiral line from knees to the tips of curved fingers. Their feet are concealed by the great fabric swathes (for which “frills” is much too flimsy a label) of their traditional bata de cola dresses: rising from those grey cascades they look like two rococo sculptures in a fountain.

There’s been reasonable diversity in the ballet shown on the BBC in recent years – from full-length broadcasts of Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty and The Red Shoes to the compelling 2011 fly-on-the-wall The Agony and the Ecstasy. That’s why it was something of a disappointment to find this week’s five-hour ballet season, which finished last night, pushing a rather blandly uniform story about Tchaikovsky, Darcey Bussell and Margot Fonteyn.

“Goya!” I scribbled enthusiastically in the first moments of La Pepa. “Dos de Mayo!

Do four programmes constitute a season?  Let's not quibble too much; though brief, the ballet season airing on BBC2 and BBC4 this week has some appealing offerings. Judging from the strong focus on famous names (Fonteyn, Bussell) and the best known Tchaikovsky ballets, the Beeb is aiming at a broad general audience, but balletomanes will be happy to see several eminent dancers crop up as talking heads, as well as lots of lovely footage of both contemporary and historic performances.